The Run of His Life

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Robert Huizenga was more than simply another defense witness whose testimony backfired. The three days on the witness stand of this Beverly Hills internist turned out, surprisingly, to be one of the more profound moments of the trial. Not since Ron Shipp’s pathetic visit to the stand was there so vivid a reminder of the empty world of O.J. Simpson.

  At Shapiro’s request, Huizenga had examined Simpson on June 15, 1994, just two days after he returned home from Chicago following the murders. The defense’s (and especially the defendant’s) idea was for Huizenga to testify about Simpson’s various ailments, in an effort to persuade the jury that O.J. lacked the physical ability to commit the crimes. As even a layman could tell, such a claim was absurd. Despite his lingering football injuries, Simpson was bigger, stronger, and fitter than most people in the United States. What Huizenga’s testimony did demonstrate was the extraordinary extent of Simpson’s self-pity. The same side of his character that drove him to complain in his “suicide” note of being a battered husband drove Simpson, during his trial, to embrace Huizenga as a witness. Regardless of the facts, Simpson never saw himself as anything other than a victim. So, overcoming the skepticism of Cochran and other members of the defense team, Simpson and Shapiro (who wanted the airtime) prevailed and called Huizenga to the stand.

  To call the forty-two-year-old Huizenga boyish does not do justice to the curiously unlived-in look of his face. He could have passed for a college student. Blandly handsome, blond, and fit, he seemed like a West Coast Dan Quayle. Huizenga had impeccable credentials—summa cum laude graduate of the University of Michigan; degree from Harvard Medical School; former chief resident at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles; former team physician for the Los Angeles Raiders football team—yet it was precisely because of his eminent qualifications that his testimony and demeanor seemed so shocking. For it became clear, as soon as Shapiro called him to the stand, that Huizenga was completely in O.J. Simpson’s thrall. In Los Angeles, it seemed, it wasn’t just the Ron Shipps of the world—the hangers-on, the wannabes—who worshipped the local celebrities. Even Rob Huizenga, with all his fancy credentials, was willing to sacrifice his objectivity, his probity, and even his dignity to ingratiate himself with a famous man, even one accused of murder.

  Huizenga was so eager to testify that he frequently cut off Shapiro before he could even finish his question. According to Huizenga’s examinations of Simpson on June 15 and June 17 (at Kardashian’s house, just before O.J. and Cowlings disappeared), Simpson suffered, the doctor said, from a “whole array of the typical post-NFL injury syndromes.” He had a pair of bad knees, a bum right ankle, and a case of arthritis. “On the day I saw him, he had significantly limited mobility,” Huizenga said. “Fast walking, certainly in terms of slow jogging, it would be very difficult if not impossible.” Huizenga also showed the jury the photographs of Simpson taken during the examination of June 17: His torso was massive and hugely muscled, but Shapiro pointed out that he had no abrasions to suggest he had just fought a life-or-death struggle less than a week earlier.

  In his breezy way, Shapiro asked whether the photographs didn’t show “a man to be in pretty good shape.”

  Huizenga helpfully disagreed. “Curiously, some people have these phenomenal builds and really aren’t in all that great aerobic shape. And I think that, based on my history, he hadn’t really been doing much exercise, if any, and there are some very lucky people that looks can be deceiving and certainly in his case, although he looks like Tarzan, you know, he was walking more like Tarzan’s grandfather.”

  Brian Kelberg, the former medical student who had examined Lakshmanan at such length, conducted what was possibly the best cross-examination of the entire trial. Kelberg began by exploring the question of bias. Huizenga had agreed that he had been hired by Shapiro under highly unusual circumstances, and Kelberg asked whether the doctor had viewed his role as “to start preparing a possible defense in the event Mr. Simpson was charged.”

  Huizenga pouted and disagreed. “I took it to address his mental problems, insomnia, and difficulty handling this incredible stress that maybe no other human being, short of Job, has endured.”

  There was a pause in the courtroom as lawyers on both sides did double takes, as if to assure themselves that Huizenga had really said what they thought he said. (Even the somnolent jurors perked up at the reference to Job.)

  Kelberg knew just how to follow up. “I want to be clear in your answer,” he said. “Is it your characterization that Mr. Simpson is in a situation which, to your knowledge, only Job has suffered more?”

  “I think the pressure that was on him, for whatever reason, was a tremendous weight, the change in his life status that very few, if any, people have experienced in my opinion,” Huizenga answered.

  “And if he had murdered two human beings, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, would that be the kind of thing that would cause a great weight to be on a man’s shoulders?”

  Shapiro objected in vain, and Huizenga had to say, “If someone hypothetically killed someone, they certainly would have a great weight on their shoulders.”

  As Kelberg continued, Huizenga strained to spin every answer in Simpson’s favor. Kelberg brought out that Huizenga had written Shapiro a series of letters in which he, a nominally independent expert, had helped Simpson’s lawyer plot legal strategy. Kelberg showcased Huizenga’s preening ego for the jury, showing how the doctor larded up his résumé with his talk-show appearances. In answer after answer, Huizenga struggled to shade his answers to help the defense. It was an astonishing, and appalling, performance.

  Even on the substance of the case, Kelberg used Huizenga to his advantage. The prosecutor meticulously went over the photographs of Simpson’s hands that were taken on June 17, and revealed to the jury that Simpson actually had seven separate abrasions on his left hand and three different cuts. His right hand was unmarked. (This fit with the prosecution’s theory that Simpson lost his left glove during the struggle at Bundy, cut his left hand, and did not lose his right glove until he returned to Rockingham.)

  But Kelberg was just warming up. He showed a video clip from a motivational speech Simpson had given on March 31, 1994—a little more than two months before the murders—for an arthritis-relief product called Juice Plus. (Among other things, this demonstrated just how low Simpson had sunk in the entertainment world; once he had made Hertz commercials for national television, now he was pitching for a questionable medical remedy at a shabby convention in Dallas.) Mugging for the cheering distributors, Simpson said, “I started taking regularly Juice Plus and started feeling—I don’t know if it was mind over matter, if it was a mental thing—but almost immediately I started feeling better all of a sudden. I was starting to get another ten yards on my drive!” Confronted with the tape, Huizenga had no choice but to speculate that Simpson was either lying to push the product or in fact had enjoyed some relief from his arthritis symptoms.

  But the climax of Kelberg’s cross-examination came when he played seventy minutes of raw footage from an exercise video that was later released as O.J. Simpson Minimum Maintenance for Men. Simpson had taped the routine—in which he looked fit and healthy in a T-shirt and Lycra shorts—at the end of May 1994, just two weeks before the murders. Trading inane patter with the coach who was directing the exercises, Simpson looked like a model of middle-aged fitness. Simpson stretched; he marched, bent his knees, did push-ups and sit-ups. The tape alone scotched the notion that Simpson did not have the physical ability to murder his ex-wife and her friend.

  The most remarkable part of the tape came so fast that it was possible to miss it the first time through. One of the routines involved the participants simulating a punching motion—right jab, left jab, right jab, left jab. As the coach on the videotape later testified, Simpson ad-libbed a narration to the punching portion of the exercise. “Get your space in if you’re working out with the wife,” Simpson said to the camera, still punching at the air with his thick,
muscled arms. Then he chuckled and added, “If you know what I mean, you can always blame it on workin’ out.” Meaning, if you punch your wife, you can always blame it on working out.

  A convicted wife beater jokes about beating his wife. Could there have been a more chilling glimpse into O.J. Simpson’s subconscious? (The jurors, it turned out from later conversations, never paid any attention to this. Indeed, they said little about the defense case at all, so exhausted and numb were they by the summer months. By this point, it appears, they had already made up their minds.)

  The defense case, then, ranged from poignant (Simpson’s family) to pathetic (Huizenga) to irrelevant (Baden and Lee) to downright incriminating (Heidstra and the exercise video). What many of the witnesses had in common was that their testimony pained them, embarrassed them, or otherwise diminished them.

  Indeed, though Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were the first and most important casualties of this case, they were not the only ones. There was Simpson’s family, those decent and loyal women in yellow who endured this long trial for a man they loved, and of course those two children, who would grow up without a mother. There were Simpson’s friends, many of whom came to realize how blind they had been to O.J.’s narcissism and brutality. There were the peripheral figures, like Shipp and Huizenga, who degraded themselves on the altar of celebrity. (Shipp, at least, came to realize what he had done.) And there was even the public at large, whose passions and biases were inflamed by the events Simpson had set in motion. None of this mattered to O.J. Simpson, because, as he had done his entire life, he cared only about himself.

  Huizenga and Heidstra gave the prosecution a brief but undeniable lift. So the defense lawyers retreated to the safe harbor they sought whenever the evidence turned against them: race.

  22. MANNA FROM HEAVEN

  Shortly after three in the afternoon on July 7—the day after the prosecution rested its case—a secretary in Johnnie Cochran’s office said she had a phone call to patch through to Pat McKenna’s cubicle. The caller, the secretary said, did not want to give his name.

  McKenna, as the lead private investigator for the defense, rarely came to the courthouse. Instead, he worked out of Cochran’s office, chasing down witnesses, following up leads, and handling the endless number of tipsters who called with purported information about the case. McKenna’s notes from most of these telephone calls wound up in a thick manila folder that bore the heading LOONIES.

  The caller on this day sounded saner than most of the others, and he offered unusually specific information. He said he was a lawyer from San Francisco and he had a client who had a friend named Laura. The caller said that Laura had in her possession about a dozen audiotapes of Mark Fuhrman talking about his police work. Scribbling as the caller talked, McKenna noted what the caller said Fuhrman had discussed on the tapes:

  —Plant Evidence

  —Get Niggers

  —So. Africa—Niggers—Apartheid

  The caller gave McKenna a phone number for Laura with a 910 area code—North Carolina. McKenna, as he sometimes did with the more credible tipsters, gave this one a code name, in case he wanted to get back in touch. “You’re Brian,” McKenna told the voice on the phone.

  McKenna put down the phone with “Brian” and dialed Laura. A man answered; he said Laura was out but would be returning in about fifteen minutes. McKenna left his name and number—but not his affiliation—and Laura called him back in about thirty minutes.

  “This is Laura Hart McKinny,” she said.

  “I’m a private investigator working for O.J. Simpson,” McKenna told her, with an edge of nervous pleading in his voice. “We really believe our client is innocent, and we understand you have some tapes of Mark Fuhrman that we think could help us very much.” Polite but noncommittal, McKinny told McKenna her lawyer would give him a call. Fifteen minutes later, a lawyer named Matthew Schwartz, who was based in Los Angeles, rang McKenna. Schwartz confirmed that the tapes existed and that they were authentic. He said that McKinny had interviewed Fuhrman for a screenwriting project. Schwartz said he thought if the defense subpoenaed the tapes, they could probably work out a way for them to be turned over.

  At 5:08 P.M., less than two hours after he first heard of the tapes, McKenna faxed Schwartz a letter formally requesting them. It was only then that McKenna realized that, as he had been talking on the phone, he had traced and retraced the same words from his original notes:

  —Plant Evidence

  —Get Niggers

  In the struggle over the Fuhrman tapes, the last great drama of the Simpson trial, it was as if the id of the case had been unleashed. All the smoldering passion, anger, and resentment shot directly to the surface. The Fuhrman tapes gave the defense the opportunity it had sought since the day of the murders to change the subject from the culpability of its client to the sins of the LAPD. But this time there was a twist. Of course, Cochran and company went about their work of exploiting racial tensions with their usual shady cynicism, but the tapes controversy gave the defense something it never had in earlier battles: the truth. About Mark Fuhrman’s character, the defense was right and the prosecution wrong. The tapes thus forced the prosecutors to confront squarely the cost of their arrogance. Having had full warning about Fuhrman’s twisted soul, Clark had embraced him nonetheless. With McKinny’s tapes, Clark and her colleagues paid the price.

  The roots of the final crisis went back more than a decade. Laura Hart McKinny had met Mark Fuhrman on a pleasant late morning in February 1985, at an outdoor café in Westwood. McKinny was sipping a drink and typing on a laptop computer, a novelty in those days, and Fuhrman came over to inquire about it. The two of them, both good-looking and in their mid-thirties, sat down to chat. Fuhrman asked what she was working on. She said it was a screenplay about female police officers. Funny, he said. He was an LAPD officer himself.

  In the early 1980s, under political and legal pressure, the LAPD had dramatically expanded the number of women on the force. McKinny said she was writing about the stresses these women faced. Fuhrman smiled. He could be a charming man, especially around an attractive woman, so he decided to taunt McKinny a little bit and, at the same time, flirt with her. He said he didn’t think women belonged as police officers, that they couldn’t handle the job, and that the recruitment efforts for them were going to lead to disaster. In fact, Fuhrman told her, he belonged to a clandestine organization within the LAPD known as Men Against Women, or MAW, which was dedicated to resisting the encroachment of women onto this traditionally male turf. McKinny immediately recognized Fuhrman as a potential resource—an insider who could give her the perspective of the hostile, sexist LAPD traditionalist. Perhaps, they agreed that first day, they could talk some more about the subject.

  That first meeting set the tone for a relationship that would last almost a decade. Their story was, in its way, a paradigmatic tale of modern Los Angeles, a city with an unproduced screenplay in many a desk drawer. Fuhrman and McKinny met again on April 2, 1985, and this time she brought her tape recorder so she could preserve his sexist (and, secondarily, racist) rants. They agreed that McKinny would give Fuhrman a $10,000 fee as a technical consultant if the movie was ever produced. Because McKinny was obviously working on a fictional screenplay, she and Fuhrman never really dealt with the question of whether everything he told her—all of his opinions, all of his war stories—was literally true. He was obviously drawing on his own experiences, but he was also trying to jazz them up for her cinematic purposes. There was a personal dimension to their relationship as well. A dreamy 1960s throwback with a taste for liberal politics and natural foods, McKinny was a perfect foil for the right-wing Fuhrman. He delighted in shocking her with his preening, even exaggerated, bigoted braggadocio.

  McKinny worked hard. She would carefully transcribe the text of their meetings, send copies to Fuhrman, and then arrive at their next encounter with a list of new questions. Ultimately, they had twelve sessions together, yielding about twelve hours o
f interviews. McKinny also went on drive-arounds with female police officers, and interviewed them as well. According to a producer who knew her, “Laura did everything a writer was supposed to do. She really got to know her subject, really did her homework. There was just one problem: She didn’t write a very good screenplay.”

  McKinny produced the first draft of her screenplay in the late 1980s. She called it Men Against Women, after the organization Fuhrman had discussed with her. McKinny’s tale concerned a rookie female officer who falls in love with her partner, who turns out to be a member of MAW. Shopped around to various studios, McKinny’s work, like most screenplays, found no takers. Over the years, McKinny would serve as a rather extreme example of the difficulties of entering the screenwriting industry. In her entire career, she had never sold a single movie script, yet she continued to plug away. She taught part-time at UCLA and in the Malibu school district, all the while pursuing her research on the police project. However, she didn’t meet with Fuhrman at all between 1988 and 1993, when she took time off to raise her two small children.

  It was during this fallow period that her screenplay nearly came to life as a commercial project. McKinny’s children attended a progressive school in Santa Monica called PS 1—short for “Pluralistic School number one.” Her children played with the kids of another parent at the school, a producer named John Flynn, who took an interest in McKinny’s project. Obviously, after all these years, there were no competing bidders, so in 1992 Flynn paid McKinny a token $1,000 for a two-year option on selling the script to a production company.